What's In A Name

By Rickie Pattenden

That being named “Rickie” could be a good thing, did not come to me in a
sudden flash of blinding noonday light. Rather, it crept over me like the silent dawn that steals onto the horizon, displacing the darkness.

Being a girl with a boy’s name and growing up in the post World War II era of strict conformity to norms, was not easy. The first day of the new school year was always an agonizing experience. The teacher would call out the student roster in alphabetical order and I’d start to squirm with apprehension, resigned to my moment of impending embarrassment. When she got to my name, she would stumble onto the pronunciation.

“Re-Re- Reeee-corrr-do?” It was always posed as a question. “Recordo
D-D-Domin-ee?”

“Here.” I would apologetically account for my presence amid snickers and
stares. Here, but I’d rather be anywhere else on earth. It did not help that as every eye in the classroom turned to me, they saw a homely undersized girl with really bad hair.

“It’s Ree-cord-oh Doe-me-nay.” I would offer.

“Is that your real name?” The teacher would ask.

“You think I would make that up?” I wanted to scream at her. “But it’s Ricky for short,” I would volunteer amid even louder sniggers. “Everyone calls me Ricky.”

Then in a smug revelation, some quick-witted classmate would announce aloud, “Ricky? That’s a boys name!” and this would mark my annual initiation
into the social status of “ being different”.

I hated being Ricky. I hated my mother and my Italian grandmother for their collaborative effort in naming me, and I found no comfort in their explanation that I had been called “Ricky” after my father. Why couldn’t they have named my sister Geo-Anne after my father? She was two years older than I, she was perfect, and her name was as pretty and feminine as she was.

When the subject of my father came up, family members would grow nervously
quiet, cast their eyes downward and turn away, so I learned not to ask questions about him or the details of his death. From fragments of overheard
conversations I was only able to gather bits of information, that some months prior to my birth, he had been killed instantly when the truck he was driving had been hit by a train at a railway crossing. To me he was nothing more than a mysterious ghost that haunted the spacious home where we lived with my grandparents; a secret face that peaked out at me from the black and white photos hidden in my grandmother’s bureau drawer along with a man’s gold watch and a blood-stained shirt.

The name dilemma followed me doggedly into adulthood. In an attempt to feminize it somewhat, I changed the spelling from “R-i-c-k-y” to “R-i-c-k-i-e” resisting the urge to dot the i’s with little hearts or circles. It didn’t help. I still had to apologize for who I was.

Sales clerks would study my credit cards suspiciously and raising a painted
eyebrow ask, “Is this your husband’s card?”

"No! It’s mine,” I would reply politely. “My husband’s girlfriend is using his card in Vancouver, which is why he’s not my husband anymore!”

More and more I found that I was introducing myself with an explanatory trailer.
“How do you do? I’m Rickie,” I would say, “Rickie is short for Recordo. My
real name is Recordo Dominee and Recordo means ‘I remember’ in Italian,” I
repeated my mother’s childhood explanation word for word. “My father’s name
was Dominic, you see, and he was killed shortly before I was born. My middle
name is Dominee, the feminine of Dominic, so my name means ‘I remember Dominic’. Get it?”

Fifty years after my father’s death, an uncle, now in his late eighties, confided to me that there were home movies of my father. For years he had kept them buried away with his memories, but had recently transferred them onto video cassettes.

“It was too painful to look at them, Rickie,” he explained to me the night he invited me into his home to view them. “But I think you should see these.” He pressed the “play” button, the tv flickered, my stomach catapulted into my throat. I swallowed it hard and watched my father’s image flash onto the screen. For the first time in my life, I met my namesake face to face.

He was a breathtakingly handsome man. Slender, youthful, spirited and carefree. His shiny black hair was slicked back away from his forehead, and his grin was a brilliant white against a tanned muscular face. He threw his arm around my mother’s shoulder, and smiled adoringly at the infant Geo-Anne
seated on her lap. He sauntered arm in arm with my grandmother down the
sidewalk in front of his boyhood home. There were scenes with him in
uniform, making animated mocking sport of military life. There were
Christmas dinners and family weddings. He was dancing, teasing, laughing
and everyone laughed with him.

He lifted his head and grinned at me from the other side of the screen. Our eyes met and, like the sunrise, the brilliant warmth that radiated from his smile dispelled once and for all, the cold, dark unknown parts of me. I felt envious of the ones there with him, the willingly beguiled.

Sometimes I wonder who would I be today had that smiling handsome young man lived.

On a sunny June day in 1947, one fatal moment determined that I would become Recordo Dominee, and now I am honoured to be his living memorial.
I am Recordo Dominee. I Remember Dominic, and I miss him.

This essay was broadcast on CBC Radio One on May 13, 1999 and is reproduced here with permission by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.